Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul
Select Format
Select Condition 
Book Overview
What should we teach our children about where we come from?
Is evolution good science? Is it a lie? Is it incompatible with faith?
Did Charles Darwin really say man came from monkeys? Have scientists really detected "intelligent design"--evidence of a creator--in nature?
What happens when a town school board decides to confront such questions head-on, thrusting its students, then an entire community, onto the front lines of America's culture wars?
From bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist Edward Humes comes a dramatic story of faith, science, and courage unlike any since the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. Monkey Girl takes you behind the scenes of the recent war on evolution in Dover, Pennsylvania, the epic court case on teaching "intelligent design" it spawned, and the national struggle over what Americans believe about human origins.
Told from the perspectives of all sides of the battle, Monkey Girl is about what happens when science and religion collide.
Customer Reviews
Rated 5 starsIt may be only the first account of this trial, but it will always be important
In Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Edward Humes produces what I am certain will prove to be one of the defining accounts of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial of 2005. Rather than produce an obtuse recitation of facts, Humes really manages to breathe life into the personalities the rest of us only heard about via the newspapers,...
0Report
Rated 5 starsDefining the Controversy
"In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still ... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time' (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory." Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind 59 (1950), 443. Pulitzer Prize winning Ed Humes delivers this comprehensive...
0Report
Rated 5 starsIf only all reporters could write so well...
This book is simply breathtaking. The Dover trial, in the mind of the public, has already lost its true details and has become little more than a rallying cry for polemicists on both side of the 'evolution war'. Humes strips away the misinformation and the sensationalism and erects in their place a well researched picture of human beings with families, goals and principles, all trying to do what is right. Despite Humes bending...
1Report
Rated 5 starsI couldn't put it down
It appears that the "culture wars" are playing out even in these reviews, and it doesn't seem likely that we'll get any neutral observations. I wonder if people who gave it poor reviews even read it. To my mind, "Monkey Girl" is about as fair to both sides as you can get,... but the trial was a slam-dunk, after all. If you read the book without any pre-conceived ideas, I think you'll be amazed at how sympathetic - and how...
1Report
Rated 5 starsthe trials (and tribulations) of intelligent design
Ed Humes has written a detailed, insightful, and even gripping account of the "intelligent design" (ID)case from Dover, Pennsylvania, which ended in December 2005 with a judicial ruling that ID was a thinly disguised form of Biblical creationism and could not be taught in Dover's ninth-grade biology classes. As the author of a forthcoming book (Viking, May 17) on five recent legal cases that challenged religious symbols...
0Report
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
